Google recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites

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Recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites
by Pierre Far, Google Webmaster Central Blog
June 6, 2012

Every day more and more smartphones get activated and more websites are producing smartphone-optimized content. Since we last talked about how to build mobile-friendly websites, we’ve been working hard on improving Google’s support for smartphone-optimized content. As part of this effort, we launched Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones back in December 2011, which is specifically tasked with identifying such content.

Today we’d like to give you Google’s recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites and explain how to do so in a way that gives both your desktop- and smartphone-optimized sites the best chance of performing well in Google’s search results.

Recommendations for smartphone-optimized sites
The full details of our recommendation can be found in our new help site, which we now summarize.

When building a website that targets smartphones, Google supports three different configurations:

1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.
2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
3. Sites that have a separate mobile and desktop sites.

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